Robert De Niro’s Netflix Thriller Just Topped Nielsen’s Streaming Movie Chart, Beating Out a Brand-New ‘Star Wars’ Release

Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings have become something of a ritual for industry watchers, offering one of the few publicly available windows into how movies and shows are actually performing across competing platforms. This week’s numbers carried a bit of extra weight, since they arrived alongside a notable change to how Nielsen tracks and reports that data going forward.

The ratings measurement company confirmed it has sped up its reporting timeline, moving from a four-week delay down to just two weeks for its Streaming Top 10 charts. That shift means audiences and industry insiders now get a much more current snapshot of what people are actually watching, rather than data that’s already a month old by the time it goes public.

Against that backdrop, the freshest Nielsen numbers for the week of August 31 through September 6 revealed a clear winner atop the streaming movies chart: Netflix’s crime thriller ‘The Whisper Man,’ starring Robert De Niro, which racked up 863 million minutes watched during its first full week of availability. That total was enough to comfortably outpace every other movie on the list, including Disney+’s freshly arrived ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.’

‘The Whisper Man,’ which follows a retired detective drawn back into a case connected to the serial killer he once caught, has been building serious momentum on Netflix since its August 28 debut. The film had already been drawing massive numbers on the streamer’s own internal charts, and this Nielsen showing confirms just how dominant its opening stretch really was compared to the rest of the streaming landscape.

‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ landed in second place on the movies chart with 727 million minutes watched, marking its first week of streaming availability on Disney+ following the film’s theatrical run. That’s a solid launch for the Jon Favreau-directed continuation of the beloved Disney+ series, though it wasn’t quite enough to knock ‘The Whisper Man’ from the top spot.

The rest of the movies chart showed a wide spread of platforms represented, underlining just how competitive the streaming movie space has become. Apple TV’s ‘Mayday’ claimed third with 382 million minutes, followed by Prime Video’s ‘The Runner’ at 368 million and Netflix’s ‘The Secret Woman’ at 354 million.

Rounding out the list were the 1980 classic ‘9 to 5,’ which is available across both Hulu and Netflix and pulled in 330 million minutes, alongside Netflix’s ‘The Angry Birds Movie 2’ at 278 million. Peacock’s ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ came in eighth with 227 million minutes, while Paramount+’s ‘Scary Movie’ and Netflix’s documentary ‘Turning Point: Generation 9/11’ closed out the chart with 173 million and 171 million minutes, respectively.

The timing of this particular chart’s release ties directly into Nielsen’s broader methodology overhaul. In a statement explaining the change, Nielsen senior vice president of product strategy and thought leadership Brian Fuhrer said the company has made a number of material improvements to streaming measurement over the years, but described this latest shift as potentially the most significant enhancement to its streaming ratings since the system launched back in 2017.

Fuhrer added that as the pace of change across the media landscape keeps accelerating, giving clients access to more immediate, up-to-date audience data helps them keep pace with how consumers are actually behaving in real time. For an industry that’s grown increasingly reliant on quick viewership signals to make decisions about renewals, marketing spend, and content strategy, cutting that reporting lag in half is a meaningful shift rather than a minor technical tweak.

First trailer for ‘THE WHISPER MAN’, starring Adam Scott & Robert De Niro.

Aug 28 on Netflix! pic.twitter.com/WX3EgcdQN8

— Lord Scummander Zhurg!🗡️ (@zhurg_) July 14, 2026

It also means these kinds of head-to-head comparisons between major streaming releases, like ‘The Whisper Man’ versus ‘Mandalorian and Grogu,’ will now surface much closer to real time going forward, giving both fans and industry professionals a clearer, faster picture of what’s actually resonating with audiences.

For now, though, the numbers make one thing clear: even with a beloved ‘Star Wars’ property making its streaming debut the same week, Robert De Niro’s crime thriller proved to be the bigger draw, at least by Nielsen’s measure.

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